Do GMO foods really affect our health?

Article by Dr. Howard W. Fisher

No matter what you may think, GMO foods are not the same as non-GMO foods. Those involved companies are using the same approach as the tobacco industry has used to argue GMOs are harmless or even beneficial to health. Yet GMOs pose a vast diversity of issues. Splicing plant genes can threaten allergy sufferers if an allergen is mixed with a staple like corn or soybeans. GMOs hardiness increase resistance to antibiotics in turn making pharmaceuticals less effective and the links to a plethora of disease are now far more than plausible. Since GMO foods were introduced in the 1990s, no one knows the long-term effects.

The U.S. fertility rate continues to fall with 63.0 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 years old, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC 2012). We may have thought that the companies that made condoms had some control over population growth. Furthermore, we may have believed that the pharmaceutical industry really had a firm grip of the birth control industry. Now the reality is that the GMO industry just may be the most influential factor especially when it comes to birth control.

There are many that will deny this and of course it may be related to the lack of nutrition in the food. Think about this: "the third generation of hamsters (being fed GMO corn) weren’t able to produce babies, so there’s real safety issues,” says Max Goldberg citing a 2007 paper.

Professor Irina Ermakova from the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences found that GM soy changed rat’s testicles….a significant decrease in testicle size. Not that this should be a surprise to any in light,“Scientists who discover adverse findings from GMOs are regularly attacked, ridiculed, denied funding, and even fired. When Ermakova reported the high infant mortality among GM soy fed offspring, for example, she appealed to the scientific community to repeat and verify her preliminary results.” This was reported by the Institute for Responsible Technology. Russia subsequently banned GMO foods.

Another paper found the same result when mice were fed GMO soy. (Surov et al 2010) [1] Alexey Surov says, "We have no right to use GMOs until we understand the possible adverse effects, not only to ourselves but to future generations as well. We definitely need fully detailed studies to clarify this. Any type of contamination has to be tested before we consume it, and GMO is just one of them."

GMO plants have been engineered to protect themselves by containing their own pesticides. Strains of maize, cotton and soybeans, called Bt plants get their name because they use a transgene that makes a protein-based toxin from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. Bt toxins are allegedly designed to be insect-specific and safe but many of us strongly suspect this is not the case. One frightening aspect is that this bacteria is similar to Anthrax and Ricin. We do not have studies that clearly demonstrate safety. Monsanto was forced to make the declaration that their initial study on GMO corn was not the six months as alleged, but only three months. When Professor Giles Eric Seralini challenged Monsanto’s safety allegations with his paper outlining premature deaths, tumor growth and kidney and liver damage in the same type of rats used in the safety study, Monsanto had his paper retracted from the journal that had published it, and tried to have him fired from his tenured position at the university.   Seralini’s experimental findings stood up to the scrutiny and his paper was republished. The World Health Organization no longer considers glyphosate a harmless chemical.

It definitely seems only logical that if you are aware of a non-GMO nutrient source and you do not make it a part of your protocol, that some of the blame lies with you!

The problem is that the public does not have to be informed about the origin of the foods (GMO or non-GMO) that they are purchasing. Further they are consuming GMO foods that have been shown to damage the liver of mice in experimental findings on the safety of GMO foods. Mice have been shown to be a close genetic match for humans and therefore this testing has validity

The evidence is not clear! There are many who support using GMOs and point out that Americans have been eating foods containing them for almost twenty years with no credible evidence that people have been harmed. These individuals may be missing the fact that the food chain is not supporting the nutrition needs of the population, evidenced by the fact that there are more than 700 million chronic diseases in a population of 328,000,000 people. Just saying there is no evidence of harm quite frankly is not equivalent to saying GMO foods have been proved safe.   According to Dr. Robert Gould, M.D. president of the board of Physicians for Social Responsibility, “The contention that GMOs pose no risks to human health can’t be supported by studies that have measured a time frame that is too short to determine the effects of exposure over a lifetime.”

A joint commission of the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has established a procedure for evaluating the safety of GMOs, which allegedly may cause nutritional changes in foods and other unexpected effects. Other developed nations have used those guidelines in their mandatory premarket safety assessments for genetically modified organisms. The FDA does not currently require any safety assessment for GMO crops.

Demand to know if the food you are eating is GMO.  The DARK Act which denies the Right to Know even eliminated the laws of Vermont, Connecticut and Maine that required the labeling of genetically engineered foods. Whether good or bad, we should have the right to know what we are eating.

[1] Baranov A S, Chernova O F, Feoktistova N Y, Surov A V, "A New Example of Ectopia: Oral Hair in Some Rodent Species," Doklady Biological Sciences, 2010, Vol. 431, p. 117–120, Original Russian Text © A.S. Baranov, O.F. Chernova, N.Yu. Feoktistova, A.V. Surov, 2010, published in Doklady Akademii Nauk, 2010, Vol. 431, No. 4, pp. 559–562.